Jeremy Au assesses a press conference held by a group of Singapore bloggers.

THEY call themselves The Bloggers 13 but their statement carried the signatures of only 10 of them.

As explained by the bloggers today, one member of the group, media academic Cherian George, excused himself as his wife was involved in the consultation paper to which they were responding.

Another blogger, Mohan Gopalan, didn’t get to sign off on the joint statement in time because it was done too quickly.

In fact, such was the swiftness of the whole process, the three representatives of the group Mr Ng- E-Jay, Mr Alex Au and Mr Choo Zheng Xi, could not remember offhand who the third missing signatory was.

But perhaps what's more interesting is the process by which the 10 had produced the joint statement, doping it in less than 24 hours.

Every one of them had a say in the statement. 

Each gave their comments on a draft they all had access to, putting in paragraphs of their views or editing each other's contributions, right up till a couple of hours before their press conference.

Throughout the process, they never met face-to-face or so much as made a conference call.

In responding to the consultation paper from the Advisory Council on the Impact of New Media on Society (Aims), the bloggers group adopted – aptly – a new media approach.

Using technology that allows multiple people to edit the same document online, all 10 collaborated on one single document.

A draft was posted online at 4pm yesterday and the bloggers gave their input until noon today, when Mr Au, who runs www.yawningbread.org, put a stop to it.

He said: “At about noon, I had to call someone to ask him to stop making amendments because we need to start printing.”

The press conference, in one of the rooms of the NUS Law faculty, was set for 2.30pm.

Added Mr Au: “This is really an example of the kind of technology we are actually talking about. The manner in which we collaborate. That’s how fast we work and that’s what the technology means.”

In fact, the whirlwind process meant that one blogger, Mr Mohan Gopalan, did not manage to sign off on the document in time.

But why the hurry?

Aims has set aside six to eight weeks for consultation and the first week is not even over.

Law undergraduate Choo, explained later: “We didn’t want to miss the newspoint”. 

Essentially, they wanted to strike while interest in the consultation paper was still high.

It’s plain that these are new media advocates who understand the rule of timeliness - a classic “must” in traditional media and all the more important in the 24/7 online world.

Read Jeremy Au's full account in The Straits Times tomorrow.